Backpage murderer killed for thrill, Macomb prosecutor says

Chief Trial Attorney Therese Tobin of Macomb County makes her closing statement in backpage.com murder trial of James Brown in Macomb County Circuit Court in Mount Clemens.
DAVID DALTON--The MacombDaily

Defense attorney Jeff Cojocar and James Brown listen to arguments in Macomb County Circuit Court in Mount Clemens.
DAVID DALTON--The MacombDaily

A man murdered four women he met over backpage.com “because he enjoyed it” and “for the thrill of it,” an assistant Macomb County prosecutor said during closing arguments at his trial Thursday.

Therese Tobin, the county’s chief trial attorney, revealed a potential motive for the first time as she asked a jury to convict James Brown of four counts of first-degree murder for killing four women in pairs in two incidents in his Sterling Heights home in December 2011.

Tobin said after Brown asphyxiated Renesha Landers, 23, Demesha Hunt, 24, on Dec. 19 he killed Natasha Curtis, 29, and Vernithea McCrary, 28, six days later in the same manner.

“You liked it, you enjoyed it,” Tobin told 13 jurors, referring to Brown. “You went out and got women of the same stature and did the same thing you did a week before.”

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Brown, a factory worker, had time to reconsider his actions, she theorized. Tobin stopped her discussion for three minutes of silence to show the amount of time it took for Brown to kill.

“It’s a long time to stop your actions, to pull away and let the person live,” she said. “But he didn’t, and once he killed one he had to kill the second person. He enjoyed it so much, so he did it again.”

Following nearly three hours of arguments, a jury began deliberating Thursday afternoon and didn’t reach a verdict before departing for the day. Deliberations will continue Friday morning in Macomb County Circuit Court in Mount Clemens following the three-week trial in front of Judge James Biernat Jr.

Tobin said Brown, 25, treated the women’s corpses like “garbage.” He placed them in the trunks of the cars they rode in and left them in an east-side Detroit neighborhood where he grew up. Landers and Hunt were found Dec. 19 in Landers’ Chrysler 300, and Curtis and McCrary were found about 1 a.m. Christmas Day 2011 in a Buick LaSabre set on fire by Brown.

“He put them in the trunk like garbage and left them down there like they’re garbage,” Tobin said.

The women all resided on Detroit’s west side, and three of them placed ads in the adult or dating section on the backpage.com, a classified ad site. The two pairs of women didn’t know each other.

Each woman “was part of a big loving family,” she said. “They were daughters. They were sisters. Three of them were mothers.”

The case against Brown was highly circumstantial, although it included some DNA evidence and admissions by Brown.

Skin cell DNA of Brown was found under the fingernails of Landers and Hunt, indicating they may have tried to fight. Brown showed a visible scratch mark on his lower cheek and broken eyeglasses around the time of the incident, a friend testified.

Three drops of Curtis’ blood were found on Brown’s pillow and on a closet door, both in the basement where Brown lived with his mother on Vancouver Street near 18 Mile and Mound roads in Sterling Heights.

Brown admitted to police he contacted the women to provide him escort services, and they went to his home. But he denied killing them, saying he fell asleep both times and awoke to find them dead. He speculated they died from natural causes or from marijuana laced with chemicals.

He admitted he dumped the bodies because he was “scared” of repercussions from his mother and law enforcement.

Brown’s attorney, Jeffrey Cojocar, at the start of closings told the jury they should convict Brown of dumping the bodies and burning the car and the garage he parked it in. But he said prosecutors failed to prove Brown killed them.

“Not one person you heard from knows how these women died or knows how many people were involved or who was involved,” he said. “There’s a lot of gaps here. If it was a jigsaw puzzle, there would be a lot of holes.”

Cojocar’s top defense witness was Bader Cassin, who refuted the two Wayne County medical examiners who performed the autopsies for cause and manner of death.

Cassin disagreed the deaths were homicides, arguing they should be “undeterminate” because the women could have died accidentally or by suicide, such as by ingesting cyanide.

The suicide remark prompted ridicule Wednesday from Assistant Macomb County Prosecutor William Cataldo, the second government attorney on the case, and a comment Thursday from Tobin, who called it “laughable” and “offensive” to the victims’ families and “the facts of the case.”

Cassin said the coroners should have been more aggressive to determine a cause of death.

Wayne County Chief Medical Examiner Carl Schmidt and Assistant Medical Examiner Francisco Diaz said they couldn’t find a cause but believed the women were asphyxiated based on all of the circumstances. Schmidt suggested “burking,” in which one or more assailants compress the chest of the victim while blocking their nose and mouth.

Brown is 6-feet 10-inches tall and at the time of the murders weighed 340 pounds.

His victims, meanwhile, were small in size. Landers was 5 feet 2 inches and 159 pounds; Hunt was 5 feet 1 inch and 161 pounds; Curtis was 4 feet 9 inches and 127 pounds; and McCrary was 5 feet and 101 pounds.

Cojocar criticized the police investigation, saying they narrowly focused on Brown and failed to probe 14 other potential suspects from tips and postings over Facebook in which someone indicated he or she knew someone involved in the incident.

But Tobin responded, “There’s no fictional person out there,” adding police received many tips due to media coverage of the case.

Brown was initially discovered as a suspect from police inspecting the records of Landers and Hunt’s telephones showing Brown’s numbers. Records placed the women at Brown’s home, and Brown at the his home and where the bodies were dumped.

Tobin noted Brown’s actions after the incidents. Hours after he dumped the bodies Dec. 19, he called and texted another women for a sexual encounter. The texts included sexually explicit comments.

After the second pair of deaths, he celebrated Christmas.

“After killing two women, life goes on,” Tobin said. “He wakes up on Christmas and opens gifts with his mother like he always does on Christmas Day.”